In wake of rising cases of coronavirus, first Telangana and now Karnataka government has deployed a COVID-19 tracking platform developed by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) taskforce. The NASSCOM taskforce drawn from 20 odd companies has put together an open architecture platform with its various advanced AI technology models to assist state governments. Launched in Karnataka on May 30, it is an "end to end COVID-19 tracking platform that is based on a plug and play concept, providing the benefit to users to decide which features they want to use and integrate with their existing platform as needed. The platform can be hosted on any cloud platform based on the preference of the state government."

These analytics-driven dashboards will assist the state governments in sustainable industry recovery and help them in taking informed decision in managing the path to recovery and phased opening across the state. All these are based on the data that is fed into it. A senior NASSCOM official says talks are going on with other states and more such announcements will follow. While it is up to the concerned state to use it to its optimal and feed the data it needs.

As part of the launch, the NASSCOM taskforce will provide the first set of dashboards for the state government's use and will add more in the coming weeks. The NASSCOM taskforce team includes companies like Intel India, Fractal Analytics, Microsoft India, AWS, Mindtree, SAP Labs India, Infosys, Accenture, Wipro, Sprinklr, Tableau, Mapbox, and others. A note shared by NASSCOM says, "The pandemic response platform is designed to benefit the central and state governments and boost their efforts by analysing a diverse set of population scale indicators that can predict certain outbreaks and advance medical care administration. The platform will provide real time streaming of data about the pandemic, across regions and states in the country and source this data from public sources that includes select social channels, websites, blogs, forums and public data sets to create actionable reporting dashboards, which will allow the government to project insights sourced from the information with public datasets display on command centre screens."

It had earlier deployed the platform in Telangana which has been designed to augment the governments' effort with a robust set of population scale COVID-19 indicators that help predict outbreaks and improve medical care administration.  It also talks of an external citizen facing dashboard, which has been developed by Fractal, to allow the government to project critical information to the public for transparency, awareness, and guidance.